Become a Greek Hero with Biborg's AR Facebook Experience for Ubisoft

For the launch of video game Assassin’s Creed Odyssey on October 5th, Ubisoft sought the help of digital agency Biborg for the creation of a personalised experience using Facebook’s new paid media AR camera effects. Whereas the social media site’s AR camera effects as a whole have been around for some time and are available globally, they have only recently made this capability available for paid media, and are exclusively testing it in the UK. The promotion allows users to customise characters using Facebook camera AR, and leads them to the game’s sales site.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey, the latest release in the Ubisoft franchise, centres on the Peloponnesian War, 431-404 BC, between Athens and Sparta. To promote the new game, Biborg and Facebook collaborated on a never-before-seen experience on the social network, using integrated AR camera effects. The paid media experience opens with a short film, then allows users to enjoy the experience, before redirecting them to the pre-sales/sales site, where they are able to order the game directly from the application.

The experience itself lets users play with the AR camera effects to step into the skin of the principal protagonists, warriors Kassandra and Alexios, and to personalise a variety of their character’s features, including helmets, armour, greaves, gauntlets, weapons, skin colour and gender. This innovative technique by Ubisoft and Biborg is both a revolutionary user experience in paid media and compliments the game’s role-playing features.

"With this experience, Ubisoft wanted to push the game’s numerous character customisation possibilities. It was a technical challenge, in terms of the variety of character attributes – both masculine and feminine – the device’s loading capabilities and the graphic assets’ dynamic animation, all of which we had to create within the platform’s limitations,” explains Alain Puget, associate director of Biborg Nantes.